Free Republic

“Alamo-Girl has already explained that the Hebrew words for evening and morning — erev (disorder) and boker (order) — in Genesis 1 refers to a flow from disorder to order, “from chaos to cosmos.” In other words, the association and contrast of these two terms point to the essence of the primordial creative act. The presence or absence of the sun is not immediately related to this idea.”

That’s pretty funny. So morning, evenings and days don’t mean mornings, evenings and days. Can I take that to mean that every time we see these words in the old testament that they take on these highly esoteric (and found nowhere in any reputable dictionary) meanings? Or do they just have these meanings when you are trying to torture words that are onviously wrong into some explanation of the real universe we know to exist?

I quoted the encyclopedia friend. Want more...

So the bottom line is, the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not argue against the theory of evolution. Evolution doesn’t violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics any more than it violates Newton’s Law of Gravity. That doesn’t necessarily mean evolution is true, but we shouldn’t make a false claim that it violates the laws of physics, unless we want to be intellectually dishonest.

http://www.noble-minded.org/thermodynamics.html

I won’t call names like you but water freezing decreases its entropy. Are you saying that freezing water is impossible?

The stuff that you present has been debunked so many times that I can’t believe people actually post it. Do you also believe in Alien Abductions?

“Shannon’s theory being mathematics is universal.”

Nonsense. Mathematics is man made. What, are you like a Pythagorean?

Shannon’s theory has nothing whatsoever to do with biology.

“One might say that God created the universe by means of the primordial light of Genesis”

One might say that but Genesis doesn’t. It says He created heaven and the earth, then the light, and apparently the “waters” were already there before the light (another absurdity).

You still did not explain how there are mornings evenings and days without a sun. You seem to be taking the story less than literally. OK. That’s what I’ve been saying the whole time.

“Interestingly, you are attacking your own position.”

Not to my knowledge. All I’ve attacked is your assumptions about what my positions are. You see, I don’t have any problem saying the simple words...I don’t know. If you ask me how the universe began, I will quite confidently say...I don’t know. You on the other hand claim to know. You have the burden. How do you know?

“In the laboratory, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”

No. That is absolutely false. In the laboratory, the absense of evidence means the null hypothesis is accepted until such time as evidnece is presented. It has to be this way lest we let anyone claim anything and thus abandon the scientific method entirely.

“The historical record is mostly missing, not every thing that ever lived left a complete record, i.e. the historical record is quantized per se, it is not a continuum.”

So what? That doesn’t mean I can say nothing about that history. For example, I don’t need your birth certificate or have to have witnessed your birth to say with confidence that you were born. A reasonable man can wake up in the morning, see the newly fallen snow and conclude that that it in fact snowed while he slept. He need not accept the proposition that the snow grew out of the ground this time cause the historical record is incomplete.

“There is no laboratory test which can falsify an alternative explanation for the observation in the dig, e.g. God the Creator, panspermia, collective consciousness.”

Another fallacy, this time a shift of the burden of proof. Again, I could claim that nothing we perceive is real. We are all hooked up to the matrix. It does not then become your job to prove this proposition false. It is the person who makes the claim of knowledge that has the burden. Clearly, you don’t want that burden and even claim that you don’t need it. That’s fine. Just don’t claim that you’re doing science.

“We posit God, then evos demand that that without determining what caused God, our position is invalid.”

No, that’s wrong. The reason that the notion of God is discarded in science is the lack of evidence for the existence of God. When you are shown that you can’t come up with a cause of God, all that is being shown is that your “posit” doesn’t even logically fit into your own claims.

“Yet evos can’t even tell us what caused the universe and expect us to accept it at face value without telling us what caused that?”

Uh, there’s ample evidence that the universe exists. Look around. It’s there. We don’t need to tell you how it got here in order to prove it’s here.

“Funny- you accept that the hypothesis’ of ‘scientists’”

Ummm, no. As I expalined, hypotheses are assumed to be false till the null hypothesis is disproven. The reason that I accept THEORY is because the null hypothesis in these instances has been disproven. The big bang happened, unless of course you can explain why the model accurately predicted the cosmic background radiation.

Good luck with that friend.

“The inconsistency is evident, “science cares” v “The notion of God has nothing whatsoever to do with science.”

No it isn’t AG. The reason that the notion of God has nothing to do with science is that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of God. Thus, for now at least, the two subjects are completely seperate. Insisting that faith in God must be incorporated into science is to destroy the scientific method that has done us so much good. Once we allow the assumption of things in the lack of evidence, anyone can claim anything.

“That you quit reading my reply at that point is quite telling.”

I hope so. This thread is about evolution and whether or not it is religion. It is not. Now, though the words of the Bible might be important to you in a debate about evolution, they are not to me. They contain no data gleaned from repeatable experimentation and/or observations of nature. Therefore, their use in a debate about science is null.

“Inflationary theory – like all physical cosmologies – cannot explain the origin of space/time.”

So what? All you are saying is that science, as of today, can’t explain everything. That doesn’t mean that your conjecture of the creator is true in the lack of evidence. To claim so would be a fallacious argument from ignorance.

“I have said that in the absence of space, things cannot exist – in the absence of time, events cannot occur – and physical causality requires both space and time.”

Yes, but you saying it does not make it so. What I have shown is that your notions of space and time and causation are nebulous at best and most probably wrong. In any case, if time is necessary for causation, then there can be no cause of space/time by your own set of criteria.

The rest of your post is you arguing with another strawman. I didn’t say i was a monist. I asked you some questions. You didn’t answer any of them BTW.

“There is no way for the universe and life to have spontaneous arisen without some sort of impetus.”

There’s a few billion years between the universe arising and the arrival of life on earth. The questions are best kept seperate. At the time that life arose, there were plenty of energy sources around so that overall increases in entropy could “cause” localized decreases. Most notably, there was the sun, vulcanism and lightning. These are massive sources of energy that can, and probably did, cause life to arise while in no way violating the second law.

Now, the arising of the universe itself is another matter. There is no good scientific theory that explains the miliseconds surrounding the big bang. Science can only start to make sense of things after the big bang happened. However, you cannot do away with problems of first cause by assuming things into existence like God. The obvious question being begged is, what caused God? If you deny that there was a needed cause for God, you just destroyed your own proposition, that everything need a cause.

“Life and DNA and the information it carries is orders of magnitude more complex that any of the silly examples evos like to use to support their claim that order can spontaneously arise from disorder.”

The very earliest proto-life proabably wasn’t DNA based. Claims of irreducible complexity are fallacious. There is work being done in this area but no actual working theory has been produced yet. The main argument going on now is between the “genes first” and “metabolism first” folks. This argument will be resolved by the data, as all debates in science. It will not be decided by who can come up with the most fallacies and call the most names at people who won’t buy into those fallacies.

The second law of thermodynamics applies everywhere. It’s just that you don’t seem to understand what it says. You can’t apply it to a sub-system that has an energy link to another sub-system. In any sub-system, entropy CAN be decreased by adding energy. However, entropy IN THE ENTIRE SYSTEM will increase due to the use of energy to reduce entropy in the sub system. In other words, the 2nd law DOES NOT say that no sub-system can have decreased entropy.

Look, we can go round and round, me citing actual science and you citing absolute non-science. In the end, you still will have nothing but faith for your God and science will march on without you. Why you want to call your religion science and in the process deny actual science is quite beyond me. But, as I’ve said, believe anything you like. Just don’t try to push it on my kid in science class.

“You cannot have natural laws without space/time and physical causality”

But we do have physical laws and you cannot conjure something into existence simply because your ideas won’t work if it doesn’t exist. The question is obviously begged. And,of course you did not address the obvious misrepresentation you made about the second law. Evolution does not in fact violate the second law. Isn’t that right?

“And inflationary theory is not creation ex nihilo.”

That’s right. I said nothing about ex nihilko anything. You’ve erected a strawman.

“Mathematically, the dimension of a space”

I didn’t ask you for a coordinate sytem. I asked you to define space itself, you know, physically. You don’t define a rock by saying it’s not a puppy. What is space made of? If it isn’t made of anything, it’s nothing, wouldn’t you say?

“In an existing physical space”

Yeah, that. What is it? Take away the mass and what is left? You are defining the ‘space” as “not the mass”. I smell an ontological misstep.

“the point within the space.”

Intersting language. The point is “inside” the space? Is the space inside anything? And, is God in the space? That is, the same space I am? Can we put a point on the grid as a location of God? Why or why not?

“Wave propagation must also have a spatial/temporal relation from cause point to effect point, i.e. physical causation.”

Nope. Again, you cannot conjure something into existence by saying, well, this math doesn’t mean anything without it. Maybe the assumptions in the math are wrong.

“Moreover, if the quantity of the parameter changes for a point, then a time dimension is invoked.”

I like to invoke Zeno at times like this. At any “point” of time, in that point, the measurement of the quantity, whatever it is, is constant. Thus there would need to intervals smaller than the point of time to give time for the quantity to change. But, again, in this smaller than point unit of time, the quantity would be constant, leaving no “time” for the quantity to change and so on ad infinitum.

See how your assumptions break down? You can’t conjure things into existence because you scribbled numbers.

“Obviously, physical wave propagation cannot precede space/time and physical causality.”

Not with the assumptions you are making about space, time and waves, that’s for sure.

“Space, time and causation are not properties of God the Creator.
They are properties of the Creation.”

Jibberish. If the creation was created at a time, the creator had to create the creation at a time. Thus, both creator and creation would both be slaves to the same time constraints you are burdening them with when you assume linear, unidirectional time.

“To the contrary, the burden is not on me to establish self-consistency for the atheist’s non-beliefs.”

Of course not, the burden is on you to show evience of the validity of your beliefs. That is what you have not done. You have given assumption and fallacy.

“God is not a hypothesis.”

Of course not. An hypothesis needs to be testable. The notion of God has nothing whatsoever to do with science, at least at present.

I hope you didn’t put anything important after your proof texting stuff. I didn’t make it past the first bit.

“It makes NO difference whether the system is closed or open- the second law still applies”

That’s just wrong. See post above and read the link.

“the law is plainly understood to indicate (as does empirical observation) that things tend towards disorder, simplicity, randomness, and disorganization,”

This is just false and I as suspected, since you don’t know the math and actual science, you are biting.

“The second law of thermodynamics has been proven mathematically for thermodynamic systems, where entropy is defined in terms of heat divided by the absolute temperature. The second law is often applied to other situations, such as the complexity of life, or orderliness. [14] However it is incorrect to apply the closed-system expression of the second law of thermodynamics to any one sub-system connected by mass-energy flows to another (”open system”). In sciences such as biology and biochemistry the application of thermodynamics is well-established, e.g. biological thermodynamics. The general viewpoint on this subject is summarized well by biological thermodynamicist Donald Haynie; as he states: “Any theory claiming to describe how organisms originate and continue to exist by natural causes must be compatible with the first and second laws of thermodynamics.”[15]

This is very different, however, from the claim made by many creationists that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. Evidence indicates that biological systems and evolution of those systems conform to the second law, since although biological systems may become more ordered, the net change in entropy for the entire universe is still positive as a result of evolution.[16] Additionally, the process of natural selection responsible for such local increase in order may be mathematically derived from the expression of the second law equation for non-equilibrium connected open systems,[17] arguably making the Theory of Evolution itself an expression of the Second Law.

Furthermore, the second law is only true of closed systems. It is easy to decrease entropy, with an energy source. For example, a refrigerator separates warm and cold air, but only when it is plugged in. Since all biology requires an external energy source, the Sun, there’s nothing unusual (thermodynamically) with it growing more complex with time.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Informal_descriptions

There is nothing that I can do if you are simply going to believe that falsity is truth.

Umm, I keep refering to the wrong people cause I’m something of a scatterbrain? Sorry about that. This board works differntly than others that I’ve used and I don’t quite have the hang of it yet.

“God who cannot lie, knows what He did and related it to us”

So sayeth the sheppard, so sayeth the flock.

Whatever metmom. You aren’t even trying to discuss the science.

Yes, the 2nd law of thermodynamics is a “law”. I went on at length in my post about what natural laws really are but, apparently, you didn’t understand. I’m sorry about that. I don’t always know how to make things simple enough for people who don’t have a rigorous background in science and math to understand. That is my failing, not yours.

Rather than me post a bunch of other things that will go over your head, please post what you think the 2nd law of thermodynamics says and explain, in your own words, how you think evolution contradicts it.

Thanks.

Yeah, riight Cott. God is a trickster who malevolently ordered the universe in such a way so that foolish humans looking at it would “think” it was billions of years old. Damn, your God isn’t very nice.

There’s nothing to be said here but that you have no evidence that this is so. By the methodology you used here, i could claim that nothing that we see, hear, feel and smell is real. We are all really lying in cacoons hooked up to a giant computer called the matrix that tricks our brains into thinking this stuff is true.

Prove it aint so.

Cott, at the beginning, if you mean the beginning of this universe, there certainlt was not a water cycle. There wan’t even oxygen never mind H2O. However, by the time some human came along and wrote down the stories that later became genesis, there most certain had been a water cycle, for millions and millions of years. How do I know the early universe was the way I say it is? Well, because there was this guy named Hubble who noticed that all galaxies are red shifted (moving away from each other). Then there was an hypothesis made that everything came from a “big bang”. These other two guys called Einstein and Lamaitre worked out a complex mathematical model to describe what such an early universe looked like. Then, extrapolating from the data, they calculated that a radiation leftover should still be around from the big bang. Then other folks went looking for this radiation and guess what? They found it. It was in all directions and measured consistently anywhere you looked and it’s measurements pretty much exactly replicated the big bang model. There you have it. Science. My version of the early universe stands on the twin pillars of evidence called the Hubble red shift and the cosmic background radiation.

Now, you seek to counter that with an ancient book written by people who didn’t understand that you can’t have days without a sun?

I don’t need Genesis to mean anything. I’m not the one trying to square it with stuff that has actual evidence behind it. YOU need Genesis to mean something other than it says. Whatever. Believe whatever you like. Scince will march on without you.

Cott,

I don’t believe that Adam was a real person nor do I believe that Eden was a real place. The story is allegorical. It is thus irrelevant to speculate on Adam’s age. Indeed, who would have made that measurement?

The reason that science should be favored over a claim of Scriptural or “revealed” truth is that scientific theory is underpinned by empirical evidence. That’s the crux of the biscuit. When you have some evidence, readilly viewable by all, that underpin your claims of “revealed” truth, then you can think to compete with science, till then, you simply don’t stand a chance.

Science unreliable? Try predicting weather with the bible and prayer my friend. Try landing a rover on mars with the same methods. Is scientific weather prediction imperfect? Yes. Will it beat religious methods every time when it comes to prediction? You bet it will. It is the track record of science that gains it its authority. Major advancement in the physical well being of men has come from science, not scripture. That’s not to say that scripture doesn’t have its place mind you. Its place simply isn’t as an information source on how the universe works.

The timidity with regards to the use of the word “truth” is well founded. Specifically, its use can run one into the exact kind of argument that you are trying to make. Since we, as scientists, aren’t 100% accurate at all times, people will claim that science isn’t (absolute) truth. Scientists don’t resist this notion. When “absolute” truth is found, if ever, there will no longer be any need for science. What science attempts is to move us closer to “truth” with the implicit understanding that we will probably never get there.

Thanks for your post AG. It was much better than the baiting that has been going on here of late. Don’t despair that i will now endevour to shred your argument. That’s why we’re here for after all.

“Order cannot arise out of chaos in an unguided physical system. Period.”

I’m sorry but this is a misreading of the laws of thermodynamics that say that overall order cannot arise from chaos in a closed system. The actual observed order at the cosmic level has been well expained by “inflation” in the early universe. Stars therefore did not need “guidance” to form. They simply arose of the natural laws.

“Cellular automata, self-organizing complexity, chaos theory et al - have initial conditions or rules.”

True but you cannot wisk away problems of first cause by invoking God. The obvious question being begged would be...What caused God?

“Moreover, in the absence of space”

Man, I’ve argued for hours about this one on physics forums. Rather than dive right in to math that I’m not sure anyone else here would grasp, let me just ask you a question. Can you rigorously define “space”?

“In the absence of time, events cannot occur. Physical causation requires space and time.”

Hmmm, well, modern physics would seem to show that causation isn’t as simple as the Kantian model you seem to be advocating here. Would you like a link to scientific evidence of retro-causation or of two interferometers, both in their own inertial reference frame, being first to make a measurement of entangled photons?

“All of these plus physical laws”

I’m sorry but you don’t seem to understand what “physical laws” are. They certainly are not a set of linear differential equations but rather they are interrelated non-linears of arbitrary complexity and fuzzy boundary zones. This puts us in the realm of chaos theory and well outside any linear deterministic basins for any non-trivial consideration of events, including human volition. Within this network, we have conditions that have been characterized as the beating of a butterflies wing in Tokyo changing the weather in New York.

Probability is fine for developing macro patterns within linear basins, which, I would suggest is precisely what the natural “laws” really are. It is useless for predicting single events, which is what life consists of. One may abstract these tendencies to produce guidelines and expectations around things, but this is not the same as proclaiming the entire universe to be deterministic. Instead what we have is abstractions derived from the complexity of things as they are which we can then talk about with predictability, but when we attempt to predict the whole of anything we are left scratching our heads, which is why gambling is such a big business and so frequently a drain on individuals’ funds.

“He still has no rational physical explanation for the:...”

I’m sorry but this is a classic argument from ignorance, a logical fallacy. You cannot use the fact that person A has no explanation of event B to justify your conclusion that explanation C must be true when you have no evidence.

“There had to be an uncaused cause of space/time itself”

No. Here you are simply ignoring all of physics since Heisenberg and especially Bells’ theorem, the most profound discovery in all of science. Causation just isn’t as simple as you are tring to make it, especially below the Planck scale. I think it very amusing that groups who rejected the Laplacean cosmology violently for like a thousand years, now cling to this discredited philosophical overreach because they think it necessitates a creator.

“science doesn’t care if there is an intelligent cause behind the guides and if so”

No, you’re wrong. Science does care. It’s just that we haven’t come up with any way to test for the existence of a creator (intelligent designer). Do you have any suggestions? Cause, ya know, the arguments offered thus far aren’t going to cut it with any reputable scientist. We need to see your experiments and your data.

“The Newtonian paradigm is not enough to understand biological life.”

Well said. Thing is, the physics community moved beyond newton long ago, before any of us were born in fact. It’s not a fault of science that philosophers haven’t caught up.